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This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

Throughout Western history, the idea of civilizational collapse has been bound up with visions of apocalyptic catastrophe caused by invasions, plagues, war, or natural disasters.

But today, the greater danger may be a dark age of sterility and stagnation that lasts for centuries.

In this dystopian scenario, nothing collapses outright, yet nothing vital is created.

Civilization settles into a state of weariness and futility that is sustained by just enough material comfort to stifle the impetus for revolution or renaissance.

In his book The Decadent Society, Ross Douthit calls this civilizational condition decadence,

and he defines it as economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity. It describes a situation

in which repetition is more the norm than innovation, in which sclerosis afflicts public institutions

and private enterprises alike, in which intellectual life seems to go in circles. In this video,

we explore whether our civilization has entered a dark age of decadence.

In his magnum opus, from dawn to decadence, 500 years of Western cultural life, the great 20th century historian Jacques Barzan wrote,

This sense of civilizational ending need not mean stoppage or total ruin. All that is meant by decadence is falling off.

It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense.

On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted.

Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Bortem and fatigue are great

historical forces. When people accept futility in the absurd, as normal, the culture is decadent.

While apocalyptic visions of collapse capture the imagination, history suggests that

civilizations more often decline through decadence than sudden catastrophe.

Ancient Rome is a classic example, after the crisis of the third century, when foreign

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